Documents £241m un-tendered MoD contract and NHS data access
The Guardian columnist George Monbiot catalogued Palantir’s deepening relationships with British government institutions in an opinion piece published 14 October, calling for major reform of UK lobbying laws and framing the company’s UK position as a test for Andy Burnham’s government.
The column opens with a PA photograph of the then defence secretary, John Healey, standing with Palantir chief executive Alex Karp at the signing of an investment deal in London in September 2025. The column’s standfirst quotes the former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson, now a Palantir senior vice-president, asking: “Do you want to let the rule of law lead procurement practice, or do you want mob rule to lead procurement practices?” Monbiot noted that one of the two common meanings of “mob rule” is a pejorative term for democracy.
Monbiot wrote that Palantir has secured contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds with the Ministry of Defence, several police forces, the Financial Conduct Authority, the atomic weapons establishment and the NHS. The company’s “superpower,” the columnist reported, citing a London Review of Books investigation by Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin, is that Palantir is “willing to spend more on securing political access than almost all of its British and continental competitors.” Palantir made “abundant use” of Peter Mandelson’s consultancy Global Counsel, Monbiot wrote, which “seems, in turn, to have made abundant use of the UK’s remarkably flimsy lobbying laws.”
Watson is one of more than 30 former UK ministers and officials Palantir now employs, Monbiot wrote. Watson, together with Burnham, was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government, the columnist noted.
The column catalogued meetings between Palantir representatives and senior British political figures. It documented an unrecorded 2019 Downing Street meeting between Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. Palantir was invited back to Downing Street when the Covid-19 pandemic began a few months later, the columnist wrote, and was working in the NHS within days on a contract for which it charged only £1. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has criticised such loss-leader contracts, which can quickly create vendor dependence and allow the company to “name its price.”
Another meeting was brokered by Mandelson in 2025, when he was UK ambassador to the United States, between Keir Starmer and Palantir chief executives Karp and Louis Mosley at the company’s Washington showroom, where they discussed defence spending. Downing Street, Monbiot reported citing Geoghegan and Amin, “refused to say whether Starmer knew that Palantir was a client of Global Counsel, in which Mandelson still held a stake of around a fifth at the time,” and the meeting “was never declared on transparency registers.” A few months later, Palantir secured a £241 million Ministry of Defence contract without an open tender, Monbiot wrote.
Monbiot reported that Martha Dalton, a key player in Andy Burnham’s Makerfield byelection campaign, enabling him to become prime minister, was on unpaid leave from Lodestone, the lobbying company she co-founded; Lodestone had done extensive work for Palantir. The Financial Times, the columnist wrote, reported that Samantha Jones, then the lead non-executive director on the board of the health department, was an adviser to one of Palantir’s partners when the company was bidding for its huge and controversial NHS contract; Jones is now permanent secretary in the same department.
There have been repeated allegations that some of Palantir’s products are rubbish, Monbiot wrote. The House of Commons science, innovation and technology committee has warned that government agencies can quickly succumb to “vendor lock-in,” making it very hard to switch providers once they begin using such products.
Monbiot catalogued the company’s wider portfolio, including software used by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to find undocumented people and work for the Israeli government identifying targets in Gaza. He cited Palantir co-founder Thiel’s claim that the NHS “makes people sick” and that the service should be “just rip the whole thing from the ground and start over.” When confronted by a protester who told Karp that “Palantir kills Palestinians,” Karp replied: “Mostly terrorists, that’s true,” Monbiot wrote.
On NHS data, Monbiot reported that after earlier official denials, NHS England granted Palantir “unlimited access” to patient data. Identifiable patient data is ordinarily visible only to those directly involved in a patient’s care or to those with informed consent, the columnist noted, adding that there are widespread concerns about how this and other datasets might be used.
In July, the government’s ethics and integrity commission recommended a major expansion of lobbying transparency, Monbiot wrote, enabling the public to see all encounters between lobbyists and ministers, aides and senior officials. He recalled that David Cameron, before becoming prime minister, said lobbying “has tainted our politics for too long” and promised to shine “the light of transparency” on the practice; the resulting legislation, the columnist wrote, proved “more loophole than law,” and did not prevent post-office figures from pulling strings among former colleagues — Monbiot cited Cameron’s own subsequent lobbying for the bank Greensill.
Monbiot closed by calling the question another “key test” for Burnham: “Will he allow the mob rule of private business to keep dominating our lives, or will he ensure that government is for the people?”